@goafrit, this should not be the case of much worry as the device inelegance will not be putting in this kind of tough situation. There will be always local intelligence will be there, otherwise that device will not survive in the market because of lack of acceptance by the users.

>> True!...Going forward, the need for "always-connected" would be a key factor...especially for the future IoT world.

It is the lowest level now. There is no going back as people are expecting everything to be hooked to the web. Any market research that does not capture that certainly has a faulty hypothesis. The world will be networked and there is a huge market in that space.

That is a very positive aspect of this. You can have the whole global ecosystem in one place.The risk is this - will these systems work when there is no power. Imagine if your toilet cannot flush because Comcast is down!

True!...Going forward, the need for "always-connected" would be a key factor...especially for the future IoT world. Is there any prediction about how the data speed is going to increase in next five years and what are the infrastructural changes envisaged?

I'm thinking this is couting only devices directly connected to the Internet and not counting things like sensors and controllers which connect via a gateway or other aggregation device. If you counted smart sensors/controllers that can be pinged from the internet the number would go up dramatically...

As per this column I posted a couple of days ago, they estimate 50 billion entities on the IoT by 2020 -- so if we assume a cross between a linear and an exponentail growtrh curve, I'd say 6 billion is reasonable around now.

I agree that I have a bunch of entities connected to the net already, but there are a lot of pepole out there who don't have any, so I'm assuming it all ballances out.